Thursday, June 09, 2005

No. 35

Esther is the DJ she chose Why can't I be you by The Cure - it makes her feel nostalgic for a long coach journey after a car had broken down.

Esther is our hero of the month: We asked her to choose a ritual from a list of 80 alternatives we had written. She selected

No. 35: Photocopy a picture of someone you look up to and wrap a present with it. Think of Esther Williams.

Three questions and three answers for the road

G:Is there any place you have never left?

Esther: I have always loved being by the sea and my work is influenced by both environmental factors of landscape and how we see ourselves in Landscape and I guess I have never left Lulworth Cove and Stair Hole on the South Coast of England. I would like to say it’s the architecture but I guess its more the Geology. The patterns and the formations, the strata of the rocks, which are visible as layers of data and evidence of time, passed. The water from under the surface forces its way up through the cracks through the sediments, it forces its way up to the surface.

G: We need nostalgia more in certain conditions than other, someone told me this one morning as I was waking up. I am thinking about the fake and the real, does it matter to you that a message is fake?

No because even something that is fake still brings something to it that's based in reality - Faking events is so easily done its is so staged on television – it (news) seems to be becoming one big commercial exercise.

Does any car mean anything to you besides being a vehicle for transport?

I drive a Landover I like it because it's easy to work on. The Landover has become a cultural icon definitely because it is so huge -it's a recognisable vehicle/ visual its been around for so long. People say it's a British icon because it helped through the war and helped to build industry - but I think that's more of a fictional narrative these people see the Landover as solid and well built unchanged since the 1950s/postwar era and that's how they want to see Britain. But it's a story really. I'm more nostalgic for a continuity of design and something recognisable.

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How we use the word ritual

We see ritual as
being a set of prescribed rules:
A specific place, which can be imaginary
Action that can be arbitrary
Context that can be immersed in a certain stillness/mood.

The ruling is public,
clear and social, the meaning may be or it may be indeterminate, private and
individual. Everyday actions like brushing teeth, wearing shoes, cooking a meal
can become the action in a ritual. By naming these actions in our rituals we
hope to bring attention to a connection that can be made regardless of place
and position or religion, but a position or notion that belong whilst moving
as an undefined.

Any type of
behaviour may be said to turn into a ritual when it is stylized or formalized,
and made repetitive in that form
(S.F Nadel 1953)

What interests
us about rituals is the opportunity for implicit multiple meanings, their ungrammatical
ness and as a form of response. We have talked about our collaboration being
something, which is a complex web of political viewpoints, and working through
performance rituals has allowed for an ambiguity of meaning and message
If we assume there must be a system to ritual or rules to organize its operation,
we might expect to recognize ungrammatical usage of the code, however
the ungrammatical is tolerated. Chaos, fragmentation, multiples, set amongst
clear set of prescribed rules describes our rituals. Prescribed rules and stylizations
are central to our work and the repetition of these even more so.